Carol Alt on Healthy Living

Why the supermodel loves eating in the raw.

At 48, Carol Alt looks annoyingly like the 1980s supermodel version of herself. She’s fit, barely lined and has boundless energy. The secret to her success? Raw food, she says. For the past 13 years, her diet has been all-natural, with no ingredient heated about 115 degrees. "If you start changing your food, you start changing your body," Alt says. "Food is the most powerful drug we have." (To help make her point, she asked to meet at Manhattan’s Pure Food and Wine restaurant—all raw, all the time—and the meal was spectacular.) Alt’s enthusiasm on this topic is endearing. "I was so stupid at 20! I was starving myself to model," she says. "I was tired all the time. I would never want to go back to that."

Today, Alt is moving forward in many directions. She has published four books (two on raw foods and two novels), acted in dozens of films (including many European productions—"It keeps me up on my Italian," she says) and launched the Raw Essentials skin care line, proving her entrepreneurial success on The Celebrity Apprentice was no fluke. Neither, apparently, is her interest in hockey players. After divorcing former New York Rangers star Ron Greschner, she now dates Russia’s Alexei Yashin, 12 years her junior.

Above all else, Alt is a student of life’s adventures. Her tough, funny attitude has seen her through divorce, recovery from cervical and uterine cancer, and the death of her father. "I know how to live, how to eat, how to do business," she says. "But there’s still so much more to learn. If there weren’t, I’d die of boredom."